One of the most difficult parts about meteorology is that it’s still an underdeveloped skill, and we can’t get close enough to a lot of factors that take part in weather. The answer to solve these problems reside in drones used for weather forecasting. It allows us to get closer to the source of inclement weather, giving the unique opportunity to use a dispensable machine to study growing weather patterns.
Whether it’s investigating hurricanes, tornadoes, or using drones as a live lightning detector, it’s changing the way we look at weather. If you look at NASA’s weather drone, Global Hawk, you’ll get the perfect conception of what weather drones can do for predictions. They fly that amazing piece of engineering through areas that you couldn’t send a pilot. Pollution clouds, natural disasters, everything—if it were to go down, a machine was lost, not a human life.
Specifically, when you look at tornadoes, there’s one really big problem—they are quickly-made, and as a result, it’s difficult to get proper warning when one may strike. You could hear about it, go to leave, and end up directly in its path anyway. Scientists are using drones to collect data in tornado-prone regions to warn residents of impending disaster with a more reliable source of analytical machinery.
These drones would be able to triple the amount of time residents generally have when there’s an impending tornado, and that’s not all. While that would save lives, and that is wonderful, it’s not the only catastrophe that drones could help us predict. More information is constantly evolving on different strategies that scientists are taking with drones and weather forecasting.
